[HN Gopher] Brazilian vote counting (real time)
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       Brazilian vote counting (real time)
        
       Author : frozenlettuce
       Score  : 81 points
       Date   : 2022-10-02 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (resultados.tse.jus.br)
 (TXT) w3m dump (resultados.tse.jus.br)
        
       | UncleOxidant wrote:
       | Where are these initial votes coming from? They show Bolsonaro
       | about 7% ahead of Lula. But only 1.5% of the vote is in, so I'm
       | guessing it's from more right-leaning areas so far? (given that
       | the polling has consistently showed Lula about 10% head of
       | Bolsonaro in the last couple of months)
       | 
       | Edit: follow-on question: are the other candidates there pulling
       | more from Bolsonaro or Lula?
       | 
       | Edit2: Looks like both Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet would draw
       | votes form Lula based on the info on them from Wikipedia. They're
       | drawing about 7% of the vote between the two of them so in a
       | runoff between Bolosonaro and Lula so it seems like most of those
       | votes would go to Lula. Still would be very close.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | cardosof wrote:
         | Richer areas always get counted first.
        
         | soneca wrote:
         | Yes, they are coming from regions of Brazil where Bolsonaro was
         | expected to go better according to the polls.
        
         | cassianoleal wrote:
         | I reckon a better picture should start to get painted at around
         | 70-75%.
        
         | frozenlettuce wrote:
         | I would say that candidates pull votes from both. People are
         | very ashamed of voting to one of the greater evils in the first
         | round - in the second round votes should be evenly distributed.
        
           | UncleOxidant wrote:
           | From reading the wikipedia entries on Ciro Gomes and Simone
           | Tebet it seems like they would definitely draw more votes
           | from Lula and that in a runoff those votes would
           | overwhelmingly go to Lula - but I'm not too familiar with
           | Brazilian politics, am I missing something?
        
             | frozenlettuce wrote:
             | Simone is from a centrist party. She tried forming a "third
             | option", but failed to gain traction. I do think that she
             | has a solid position for 2026.
             | 
             | Ciro is from a traditional leftist party, and worked in the
             | Lula government. In the past few weeks he has been
             | resorting to nationalistic and more right-wing talk (pro
             | family values, against identity politics). So the Ciro from
             | the beginning of the election would draw votes from Lula,
             | but not the one in the end. Some trivia: Glenn Greenwald
             | has a close relationship with Ciro.
        
         | Qem wrote:
         | Small, far away cities, say, in deep Amazon and in northeastern
         | semi-arid, take more time to be counted. Lula electorate is
         | more overwhelming in those areas, as they have more poor people
         | that suffered a lot with current policies in Bolsonaro term,
         | like relatives dying without suplementary oxygen in the
         | pandemic, due to mismanagement.
        
           | UncleOxidant wrote:
           | I would guess there are a lot of poor people in the cities
           | like Rio de Janiero as well.
        
             | bluepizza wrote:
             | Yes, but in urban areas, poor people are targeted by
             | evangelical churches, which are all supporting conservative
             | candidates. So it's really hard to predict if a
             | disadvantaged area will vote left or right.
        
         | gtirloni wrote:
         | Overseas polls that closed earlier. Mostly middle class that
         | moved abroad but still vote.
        
       | haolez wrote:
       | The last poll came out just yesterday[0]. It pointed out to Lula
       | being way ahead of Bolsonaro (50% vs 36% for Lula), but so far it
       | seems that Bolsonaro has a chance of finishing ahead of Lula (46%
       | vs 44% for Bolsonaro so far).
       | 
       | It's the same as in the 2018 elections. I'm neutral in this
       | election, but on this specific topic of election polls, I agree
       | with the conspiracy theorists that something is really off about
       | them.
       | 
       | [0] https://g1.globo.com/politica/eleicoes/2022/pesquisa-
       | eleitor...
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | Voting stats are like real life computer games.
        
       | rogerthis wrote:
       | No one sees a vote. It's just bleebleeblee and it's magically
       | computed.
       | 
       | PS: Weirdly.
        
       | pruthvishetty wrote:
       | Any details on the infrastructure behind this? How are they
       | handling security?
        
         | gabriel34 wrote:
         | Security audits and supervisors from all parties in all steps
         | for starters.
         | 
         | The voting machine prints a total for that machine at the same
         | time that the votes are transferred to the central counting,
         | this process is public, the supervisor from each party get a
         | copy of the total, and one copy is publicly affixed at the
         | voting place, so parallel aggregating from the partial counts
         | is possible (and has been done by sampling).
         | 
         | Internal counting on the voting machine is somewhat validated
         | by picking random voting machines out of the voting places and
         | conducting a parallel voting, publicly broadcasted, on which
         | known amount of votes for each candidate are input and the
         | result from the machine is compared to the expected. Only thing
         | missing that I can think of is actually doing this parallel
         | voting on the same time and place the voting was expected to
         | take place.
        
         | frozenlettuce wrote:
         | That's a sensitive topic, as Bolsonaro has questioning the
         | voting machine security.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil
         | 
         | Even Tom Scott's video about electronic voting shows in Brazil
         | with a warning saying that "electronic voting is safe" (the
         | same type of warning that shows up for conspiracy theories).
         | 
         | We had no problems with those machines since 1996. My take is
         | that he does that to mobilize his support base.
         | 
         | One curious thing is that the centralized voting counting is
         | done with an Oracle system. Some politicians questioned the
         | contracts value, and why AWS or Google cloud weren't considered
         | - authorities argued that only Oracle supported Oracle's cloud
         | : )
        
           | bigbluedots wrote:
           | > We had no problems with those machines since 1996.
           | 
           | None that have been discovered yet at least!
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | > We had no problems with those machines since 1996.
           | 
           | This is the kind of thinking that gets you to "less than 1%
           | of rape accusations are false". How do you know you don't
           | have any problems?
        
             | frozenlettuce wrote:
             | Each party has delegates present during vote counting, in
             | state and city level. That only became an issue recently.
             | That said, I do believe that the system would be better if
             | physical counting could be performed as well, to increase
             | public trust and to avoid the same situation in 82 fraud
             | against Brizola.
        
               | tarakat wrote:
               | > Each party has delegates present during vote counting
               | [..] the system would be better if physical counting
               | could be performed as well
               | 
               | If there's no physical counting, then what are the
               | delegates observing? If the machines were compromised,
               | how could they tell?
        
               | Matheus28 wrote:
               | I believe they also have a button to spit out current
               | vote count for each candidate, obviously still possible
               | for the code to detect when that button is being used a
               | lot to check if it's counting properly.
               | 
               | It's tricky because votes are meant to be secret (and
               | voters aren't allowed to have proof of who they voted
               | for, so they can't be coerced into revealing it), while
               | at the same time you want the system to be secure.
        
               | frozenlettuce wrote:
               | You have the total of votes per machine. In looking at
               | these locations local candidates have a good notion on
               | how well their party is going to perform. Things that
               | call their attention are the "bumps" like the one by the
               | end of last US election. When that happens, they can
               | signal the voting machine to be isolated and call in an
               | electoral judge.
        
               | tarakat wrote:
               | Sounds easy to evade. Once a machine has recorded 10+
               | votes since the last time it outputted a count, it could
               | start giving a small probabilistic advantage to a
               | preferred candidate, at the expense of other candidates.
               | There would be no bumps, and the results would never
               | differ by more than, say, relative 20% from the real
               | count. E.g. if preferred candidate got 10% on one voting
               | machine, it would give him 12%, taking the other 2% from
               | all other candidates.
               | 
               | No bumps or disproportionate popularity in traditionally
               | unpopular regions to raise suspicion.
        
           | biscoito wrote:
           | It's also nice to note that there have been already security
           | audits on the current system, TPS (The public security test
           | for TSE the Superior Electoral Court) happens every year
           | addressing the security of e-voting in Brazil, for example,
           | on TPS 2017, people managed to find arbitrary code execution
           | in the Urna Eletronica (That's how we call the e-voting
           | system here)
           | 
           | Great content to read: https://urnaeletronica.info/ https://w
           | ww.researchgate.net/publication/326261911_Execucao_... https:
           | //www.researchgate.net/publication/323470546_The_Retur... htt
           | ps://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914587_The_Good_...
        
       | mrlonglong wrote:
       | Did anyone notice the English translation of Lula's name is
       | Squid? Honestly?!
       | 
       | I do hope he wins, for the planet's sake.
        
       | firekvz wrote:
       | Before the whole debate of electronic vote being safe or not,
       | please considere the following:
       | 
       | Not all countries work the same, what you perceive as corruption
       | in the US is nowhere near of the reality of corruption in
       | southamerica, a place where corruption is not only a word or a
       | definition but it's literally the force that move things,
       | corruption is pretty much already part of the culture.
       | 
       | So please, don't put your own experiences from the US/1st world
       | countries in practice here, trying to explain how things work in
       | 3rd world countries when you are not fully aware of the level of
       | corruption in brazil. If brazilians themselves are talking about
       | the huge window oportunity for corruption is because they know
       | their culture, they know their problems and they know exactly how
       | things work in their very own coutry.
        
       | cesarb wrote:
       | In case you're curious about the voting machines which were used
       | in this election, here's a voting machine teardown (2018):
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrMLzqgKEI
       | 
       | (That's for an older model which is still in use, there's also a
       | newer 2020 model.)
        
       | thrownawaysz wrote:
       | Is this site legal? I opened it once through Chrome where uBlock
       | Origin runs, and now I just got a mail from a .br address into my
       | inbox (not even the spam folder)
       | https://files.catbox.moe/ijuogv.png
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | frozenlettuce wrote:
       | All votes in country should be counted in the next few hours
       | (last one took about 6hrs and people got angry with the delay).
       | The results that are displayed right now are from voters from
       | other countries where voting is already closed.
        
         | frozenlettuce wrote:
         | This is now outdated as local votes are already going in.
        
       | euparkeria wrote:
       | Iam so anxious, we have to take this monster away.
        
         | UncleOxidant wrote:
         | Given that he's actively encouraged more destruction of the
         | Amazon rainforest it's in the best interests of everyone on
         | earth that Bolsonaro go away.
        
           | 988747 wrote:
           | Don't know anything about Brazilian politics, but I'm already
           | starting to like the guy, based on the comments above :)
        
         | mercy_dude wrote:
         | Who is the monster and why?
        
       | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
       | Is it winner-takes-all plurality voting or will there be a second
       | vote if no candidate reaches >50%?
        
         | rapfaria wrote:
         | second vote between two highest voted if none reaches 50% + 1
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | That doesn't sound fair to me.
           | 
           | Like someone else mentioned, if Ciro Gomes and Simone Tebet
           | draw votes from Lula, then there might not be a second vote
           | and Bolsonaro has a better chance, whereas if there is a
           | runoff between Bolsonaro and Lula, those votes would go to
           | Lula.
        
             | tremon wrote:
             | Gomes and Tebet drawing votes from Lula doesn't affect the
             | number of votes going to Bolsonaro, right? So whether or
             | not they are on the ballot doesn't affect Bolsonaro's
             | chances of reaching 50%+1 in the first round.
        
           | cassianoleal wrote:
           | Technically it's >50% even if for less than a whole vote.
        
             | rapfaria wrote:
             | How is it possible to have less than a whole vote?
        
               | cassianoleal wrote:
               | With an odd number of votes. e.g. if winner has 1000 and
               | the sum of the others is 999, it goes by a half vote.
        
         | ufo wrote:
         | Second vote for governor & president. Winner-takes-all for
         | senate seats. For the lower house of parliament the seats are
         | proportionally distributed between the political parties.
        
       | frozenlettuce wrote:
       | This website has voting with a map as well
       | https://www.poder360.com.br/eleicoes2022/apuracao/
        
         | ece wrote:
         | https://www.poder360.com.br/eleicoes2022/apuracao/
        
           | frozenlettuce wrote:
           | fixed! gotta love posting on mobile
        
       | randiantech wrote:
       | Independent of the results, I find it truly amazing how fast
       | results are available for the public. Literally every refresh
       | shows hundreds of thousands of new votes already verified and
       | counted.
        
       | RivieraKid wrote:
       | Googled Lula's opinion about Russia's war against Ukraine.
       | Surprisingly, he seems only slightly less pro-Russian than
       | Bolsonaro.
        
       | RivieraKid wrote:
       | Is there a web site showing implied probability of who would
       | become the next president based on betting odds?
        
       | impeplague wrote:
       | Side note: YouTube has a policy about not questioning the results
       | of previous elections. In Brazil, this also includes questions
       | about the security of electronic voting machines.
        
         | sonthonax wrote:
         | > YouTube has a policy about not questioning the results of
         | previous elections.
         | 
         | Such an absurd and institutionally biased policy, the USA has
         | on many occasions in the last decade vigorously endorsed the
         | outcomes of clearly rigged elections as a matter of policy.
         | Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
         | 
         | Will big tech remove valid accusations of ballot stuffing
         | because it aligns with US policy?
        
           | pclmulqdq wrote:
           | Don't worry. If the US political party that YouTube employees
           | favor loses the next election, this rule will be gone.
        
           | frozenlettuce wrote:
           | yes, they even flagged the Tom Scott video about eletronic
           | voting with the following warning: "The Brazilian electronic
           | voting system allows the exercise of citizenship with greater
           | security. The ballot box was developed to compute votes
           | safely and confidentially, meeting the demand and specific
           | characteristics of Brazil."
           | 
           | So eletronic voting is good or bad depending on what the
           | candidates are.
        
       | lhorie wrote:
       | A few points of interest for those who aren't familiar w/
       | brazilian politics:
       | 
       | - as the link shows, brazilian political parties are numerous, so
       | general elections typically have multiple candidates. There's no
       | electoral college.
       | 
       | - voting is mandatory in Brazil. In the 2018 presidential
       | elections, there were ~117M voters. By comparison, the last US
       | presidential election saw turnout of 158M voters.
       | 
       | - Brazil has used electronic voting since 1996. General public
       | sentiment towards it has historically always been positive. No
       | instance of fraud has ever been surfaced and the system produces
       | results extremely quickly (as in, within the same day).
       | 
       | - Recently the president has been questioning its security, but
       | for some context on his political platform, he also held a
       | similar stance to Trump on the topic of Covid and has been
       | criticized over his position saying deforestation is good for
       | economy. He's still the favorite candidate. The second most
       | popular candidate (Lula) has a long history of controversy (one
       | of the most high profile being him being implicated in
       | investigations related to the impeachment of the previous
       | president Dilma). As you can imagine, many brazilians are cynical
       | about the country's political system. Take that as you will.
        
         | gberger wrote:
         | You are mostly correct, but a bit misinformed in two topics.
         | One, the favourite in all the credible polls is Lula. Second,
         | the impeachment of Dilma was due to irregular monetary policy,
         | while Lula was investigated for unrelated corruption charges.
         | And please do not forget to mention that Lula's guilty verdict
         | was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself
         | corrupt- so now Lula is presumed innocent.
        
           | lvass wrote:
           | >was invalidated on the basis that the judge was himself
           | corrupt
           | 
           | No, firstly the legal system changed and the veredicts given
           | were considered insufficient for conviction. Then, they were
           | annulled based on being outside the court's jurisdiction.
        
         | UncleOxidant wrote:
         | > voting is mandatory in Brazil
         | 
         | What happens if you don't vote?
        
           | haolez wrote:
           | If you miss a few elections, you get put into a blacklist and
           | can't get a passport, work for the government and a few other
           | things.
           | 
           | However, the fine for missing an election is ridiculous. It's
           | something like 1 dollar. If you don't want to vote, you can
           | stay at home and then pay this fine, but there is a caveat:
           | 100% of this fine's value goes to Fundo Eleitoral, which is a
           | fund managed by the parties and meant to be used for their
           | publicity. In other words: you put money in an instrument
           | that's probably corrupt.
        
           | gaius_baltar wrote:
           | Other people already explained the base case, but also: for
           | voters who are out of the town were they originally enlisted,
           | it just a matter of going to any poll station and filling a
           | justify form. It is usually quicker than voting but, as the
           | voter can not do it at the enlisted town, it is not an
           | alternative.
           | 
           | Voting is also highly distributed, on most towns no voter has
           | to travel more than 1 or 2 km to get to their assigned
           | polling station (if they enlisted to the station nearest to
           | their homes, of course). Every voting zone is split in a
           | number of "voting sections", every one with a single voting
           | machine, and the number of section/machines per zone is
           | mostly proportional to the number of voters, so queues are
           | not that common; unless people group in some particularly
           | unfortunate times ... local jokes say to NEVER vote at the
           | opening hours, or you will be stuck on a line of senior
           | citizens (who also have the right of jumping the queue,
           | defined by law).
           | 
           | Also, everything is defined with months of advance, so there
           | are no surprises on where to vote.
           | 
           | There is _a lot_ of safeguards to prevent fraud (we had a lot
           | of time to learn this by the hard way) but the bad part is
           | these also prevent some nice things (quickly moving your
           | enlistment to another town /zone/section, mail voting, etc...
           | even transit voting is very limited because you will need to
           | know where you will be long before the poll).
        
           | geonnave wrote:
           | You just have to file a note explaining that you could not
           | vote -- we call it "justifying the (non-) vote" / "justificar
           | o voto". As of the current election, the it can be done on a
           | mobile app.
        
           | biscoito wrote:
           | You get a R$ 3,51 fine, around US$ 0.65.
        
           | frozenlettuce wrote:
           | If you don't pay the fine you can't apply for public jobs, if
           | already a government employee you can't receive a salary,
           | can't issue a passport, and other restrictions. Nowadays you
           | can justify the absence using a cellphone.
        
         | nine_zeros wrote:
         | The only people so worried about voting machines and voting
         | fraud are frauds themselves who wouldn't win without
         | disenfranchising a large swath of voters.
        
           | atahanacar wrote:
           | This makes no sense. Voting fraud is a real worry, especially
           | when the competition is known to have no ethics and ignore
           | any rule they can.
           | 
           | Just because nobody is doing it now doesn't mean you should
           | not be worrying about it.
        
             | roamerz wrote:
             | Agreed. Show up at the polls in person with government
             | issued ID that has your picture and indicates if you are a
             | Citizen and your address. That ID is then matched to an
             | online database. No more of this mail in vote. Not one
             | Citizen should have to worry about the accuracy of the
             | vote.
        
           | erinnh wrote:
           | The CCC (Chaos Computer Club, which are one of the largest
           | hacker collectives in Germany) area also sceptical about
           | electronic voting machines and have been campaigning against
           | them for roughly 20 years. Id definitely not call the CCC
           | "frauds".
           | 
           | Since 2009, electronic voting machines are illegal in
           | Germany. The argument of our constitutional court is that
           | every single voter needs to be able to understand how our
           | voting system works without being an expert.
           | 
           | https://wahlcomputer.ccc.de/
        
             | zorked wrote:
             | Brazil has a different threat model than Germany.
        
               | erinnh wrote:
               | I made no comment on the Brazil election, because I have
               | no information about even how elections look like in
               | Brazil.
               | 
               | I was just commenting on the statement that only
               | fraudsters would be against electronic voting machines.
        
         | stefan_ wrote:
         | It's still winner takes all, so sure, "political parties are
         | numerous" yet all but two are hopeless.
        
         | otikik wrote:
         | The machines were not a problem when he won the first time.
        
       | abdullahkhalids wrote:
       | Off-Topic.
       | 
       | I initially opened the website in Firefox. But did not grant it
       | location permissions. So nothing showed up. Then I opened it in
       | Chrome and gave it my location permissions. I started seeing
       | stuff on Chrome, but also in Firefox.
       | 
       | So the website has stored my ip+location information.
        
         | mahmoudhossam wrote:
         | I denied the location request and it worked anyway on Chrome.
        
         | NavinF wrote:
         | More likely the site is just unreliable and happened to work on
         | the second try in Firefox. It is completely broken on iOS after
         | denying location permissions.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-02 23:01 UTC)